How to Win the World Cup

Here’s how: Win the World Cup final. If you think that’s a simplification, please browse this more extensive version: 1) Qualify for the World Cup; 2) Successfully reach the World Cup final; 3) Win it. Everyone with a calculator is busy reverse-engineering reality to come up with the formula that explains what it really takes—you know, once you peel away the thin scrim of data represented by an actual game and take a Freakonomic, Don DeLilloish look into the depths behind it. But winning the game is what it really takes. Correlation does not imply causation, and soccer is historical rather than transcendental, and as long as those things are true, none of these formulas can be anything more than a suggestive tour of the past, even if they always seem to market themselves as the key to all mythologies. It’s frustrating.

The occasion for this tirade is the Atlantic‘s publication yesterday of “What It Takes to Win the World Cup,” by Henry D. Fetter, which opens with the following bit of pith:

What does it take to win the World Cup? Past results suggest that going through a period of dictatorial government is almost a sine qua non for a nation to be a champion.

I haven’t read Henry D. Fetter’s baseball stuff, and for all I know he’s a smart and reasonable writer. But this is just inane. His argument is that most (not even all!) of the seven nations that have won the World Cup were governed by a dictator at some point during the 80 years since the first World Cup, therefore the Netherlands, which is the only current quarterfinalist that doesn’t meet that condition, is “very much an outlier if the Dutch hope to come out on top at last.”

Leaving aside the fact that this is a weird, weird way to frame Holland’s chances when it’s also the case that they look noticeably worse at soccer than their next opponent, as a statistical proposition, it’s just absurdly arbitrary. Six of the seven past World Cup winners were governed by dictators in the last 80 years, England being the exception. That means around 86% of World Cup winners have had dictators during the World Cup’s eight-decade run. Fine. But that number is only interesting if it’s significantly higher than the percentage of all competing countries to have had dictators during the same period; otherwise it’s just an artifact of the historical reality that most countries have had dictators in the last 80 years. By my count, in the current World Cup, 25 of the 32 countries have undergone periods of dictatorship since 1930. That’s 78%, and that number treats South Africa, despite apartheid and everything else, as a consistent democracy. The percentage of all countries on earth to have had dictators in the last 80 years is surely even higher than that. Draw your own conclusions about whether 86% is a meaningful number.

Again, correlation doesn’t imply causation; the fact that two things occurred simultaneously doesn’t prove that one caused the other without a mechanism to demonstrate the cause. Fetter gestures toward such a mechanism—“soccer prowess proved a national morale builder for the dictatorships of the last century”—but while it holds up in some specific cases (Mussolini, et. al.), as a general theory it’s just silly, especially considering that, as Fetter himself points out, most of the World Cup-winning countries that have had dictators since 1930 weren’t actually dictatorships at the time when they lifted the trophy. Are we really supposed to believe that the fact that “Vichy France actively promoted athletics as part of its recipe for national rejuvenation” was the driving power behind the French team that won the World Cup in 1998?

In fact, you could look at Fetter’s numbers from a slightly different angle and argue that dictatorships actually impede World Cup success. After all, there have been 18 previous World Cups, and only four winning teams—Italy in 1934 and 1938, Brazil in 1970, and Argentina in 1978—have come from countries that then had authoritarian governments. That means 78% of World Cups have been won by non-dictatorships. Why is that not the relevant number?

That might be taking skepticism too far—I don’t really mean to suggest that GDP plays no role in a country’s soccer success. But even here, the conditions under which good soccer is likely to flourish vary over time, because soccer isn’t an unchangeable abstract but a historical phenomenon that’s influenced on some level by every factor in the world. Whatever role GDP plays now, or ex-dictators, it’s almost certainly not the same as it was 80 years ago. The only condition that’s both sufficient and universal is that you have to win the match.

How to Win the World Cup

I couldn’t agree more. I didn’t get through all of Soccernomics/Why England Lose, but some of their points seemed common sense, and others just seemed to be grasping at straws. But I’ve noticed that a lot of Americans who aren’t normally in to soccer found the book to be brilliant…the implication I got was that they felt soccer needed to be “explained” in a way like Moneyball or Freakonomics. I really hope this trend peters out.

Without having read the original piece, thank you for taking down this pitiably insecure waffle. Clever American publications have constantly amazed me at this World Cup, with their cavalier co-opting of football as a means to talk about foreign policy and economics and say nothing at all about any of the above. The goodness of your piece is directly proportional to the bullshit of its subject.

@roswitha The piece ends by hoping that the dictatorship explanation offers “at least a sliver of a silver lining for the USA’s own defeat.” We may not win the World Cup, but at least we’ve never been ruled by a military junta, Argentina.

Seems to me the most obvious stat that anyone should throw out is that if a team wears kits that are colored canary yellow, bright blue, and electric green, they win. A lot. I guess that screws the Dutch right away. Maybe the dutch team should try a last minute swap from Orange to Canary and see if there is any causation to my theory.

Or maybe we should just try to look at which team has better players and better tactics.

That’s probably way to complicated though, huh? Better to stick with GDP, solar flare alignment, and average number of bacteria in native dog crap to make our predictions.

The main problem with these formulas (and a lot of predictive statistics) is that you’re right- correlation, no matter how elaborately constructed, does not equal causation. My stats and methods prof always hated Freakonomics because people treated it like more than it was- complicated correlation.The variables are so subjective that they can be made to bend to any outcome. They sacrifice one tailed or two tailed validity (I doubt, sincerely, that they simplify down to a simple t-test). Given the subjectivity of the variables involved, the ethics of the researchers need to be questioned, any statistic where the subjective change of a subjective variable dictates the predicted outcome (they need ‘tradition’ because otherwise Brasil isn’t most likely to win) would be considered unethical (and wouldn’t pass IRB).

@Joe H. One good comparison may be with the formula U.S. News concocts for its college rankings every year. They’re always going to put one of the same 3-4 schools in the top spot, and it’s just a matter of massaging the weight given to alumni giving rate or student-faculty ratio to achieve the desired result. (In this case, the variables themselves aren’t subjective, but the importance ascribed to each of them is.)

Now, these are fantastic schools, just as Brazil and Spain are fantastic soccer teams. But it’s always hard to countenance research that starts with the result it wants and then devises an experiment to achieve it.

I quite enjoyed Berliner2’s comment on the Atlantic piece… that guy would fit in well over here. In only tangentially-related news, did folks check out the NYT piece on the Ajax youth academy from a couple of weeks ago? Now, that actually provides some insight on why Dutch soccer is the way it is: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/magazine/06Soccer-t.html?pagewanted=all

Also: I don’t know much about the history of Uruguay, so maybe someone can help me with this, but as far as I can tell Uruguay’s period of dictatorial rule occurred in the 1970s and ’80s. They won the World Cup in 1930 and 1950!

@Brian Phillips Ah, but as Nike knows, the power of football is enough to bend space and time. That’s why I’m so worried about the future of British politics… it can only be a matter of time before Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland gain independence and, without the civilising celtic influence, England descends into the kind of chaos that we can only recover from via the iron hand of an authoritarian regime: thus finally explaining our 1966 World Cup win.

Actually, if one were to want to find the true cause and correlation of soccer success, I have no doubt I know the answer: the number of hours/year that a country’s 18 and under population plays soccer divided by the 18 and under population.
There is no doubt that a main predicter of being really good as a nation is the talent pool you have to choose from. This is largely based on a single factor: the number of experts in a field you have to choose from. The more you have, the more selective you can be. Since 10,000 hours of practice is the commonly held number for the amount of time needed to become an expert, if you can figure out which country has the most kids who have practiced 10,000 or more by the time they are 18 (when most of their soccer skills are largely developed) you would have the country who has the deepest number of experts to choose from.
This explains why there is a commonly held misconception why the U.S. should be better at soccer because of all its youth players it has. If you are involved in American youth soccer at all you know that very few kids play enough soccer as a kid to become an expert in the field with the touch and skill required at the highest stage. Most American kids don’t play a lot of pickup soccer, but only go to practice, maybe 5 hours/week and a 2 games/week = 7 hours/week. To reach the requisite 10,000 hours by the time you’re 18 a player needs to practice (by that meaning formal practice but more importantly playing pickup games) 16 hours/week from when the player is 6 years old. Americans don’t do that. Brazilians, Argentinians, African kids do! A large percentage of young boys in these areas spend most of their free time playing soccer. American kids do not.
That is why Brazil is the best. They have a relatively large population, and out of that relatively large population, a relatively large percentage of its kids spend a lot of time playing soccer.

I would love to read a story on Maradona and Dunga, comparing their backgrounds and the process that was used to select them. Who looked at Dunga and went “ok, he’ll win it for us”?

I’m an Arsenal fan and have a number of friends who are Liverpool fans, so the question for us: how do you win the EPL? The answer seems to be-compose the best team possible and hope nobody gets their legs broken.

Hmm. The Soccernomics logic didn’t seem that controversial to me. If anything it was a little banal. Who can doubt that population size, wealth and footballing history/infrastructure are important to World Cup success? I just don’t understand why they backed New Zealand and Serbia; it doesn’t seem to tally with their own formula. Although, to be fair, New Zealand did outperform expectations quite spectacularly.

“As it turns out, the correlations between repression and good soccer seem to be closely related. With the exception of 1998 champions France (its 1940-44 Vichy regime notwithstanding), only one World Cup champion since 1970 can boast of a fascist-, strongman-, or junta-free twentieth-century history. Notably, 1970 champions Brazil and 1978 hosts and winners Argentina won their titles while toiling under authoritarian military juntas. So it takes a good right-wing dictatorship—fascist, military, or otherwise—to incubate a soccer team and . . . .”

Funny stuff. (Is this the space to insert a snarky comment about the USMNT not doing very well under Bush?)

@Brian Phillips I’m right there with you. I hate this kind of lazy gimmickry (Foer, in particular). There are a million great stories that reflect how soccer has shaped or been shaped by particular circumstances–political and otherwise. Those stories don’t have to be conclusive to be interesting. But writers like Foer and this Atlantic guy take refuge in sounding authoritative, because they’re not actually interested enough in what they’re writing about to spend the time meandering down the dusty hallways of soccer’s past. Or present, even, in the case of those churning out tournament coverage.

Did we have the books conversation on this blog already? I think David Goldblatt did a really nice job in “The Ball is Round,” whereas these other clowns are just pretending.

Ya know, Brian, the key to winning the World Cup is pretty simple and I, for the life of me, can’t figure out why more national team coaches can’t figure this out. The recipe is simple, before the game you give this speech:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZ-ru03J2OQ

@Nora “Those stories don’t have to be conclusive to be interesting.” That’s exactly it — there are so many interesting things to say about, for instance, how fascist regimes have interacted with soccer, how moments in the game’s history have been influenced by specific social conditions, etc. It’s this need to overgeneralize and produce bogus unified field theories that’s so maddening. It’s obviously a product of writers feeling that this is the only approach that will get them published or get them attention. But why can’t you just tell a good story?

@Timoteo This is the secret knowledge Rafa is counting on to repeat the treble with Inter.

@Brian Phillips “It’s obviously a product of writers feeling that this is the only approach that will get them published or get them attention. But why can’t you just tell a good story?”

Well, there is a whole media machine whose groupthink and susceptibility to trends determines what kinds of stories get written. Editors are the gatekeepers of those self-satisfied, obnoxious grand narratives, but it’s still the players on the field who commit the offense (hmmm… Dunga: Melo :: Atlantic Monthly editorial staff: Foer?).

I really believe that the reason they can’t “just tell a good story” is because they don’t love what they’re writing about all that much. It’s got to light up your brain. That’s why I’m sort of fond of Ray Hudson, even though he loses the plot on a regular basis.

Brian, you are absolutely right that Fetter’s arguments fail because he does not recognize that correlation, though necessary, is insufficient to imply causation. But these pseudo-statistical facts also fail because we have such a small sample set. There have been only 18 World Cups. That is a meager collection of data from which to draw conclusions.

I do not know if this obsession with sports statistics is primarily an American phenomena or a global phenomena. If the former, then I feel like laying the blame on baseball, which is a sport that actually generates enough data to allow fans to draw statistically significant conclusions. If the latter, then this is just a universal, and thus inexplicable, obsession.

Fortunately, outside your well written articles, I will ignore this phenomena and just enjoy the games.

@Nora – your first reaction to a rhetorical question was to come up with a grand theory answering it. Let me counter your grand theory with an even grander one – maybe people just like telling and hearing grand stories. That’s a lot more concise than ranting about the “media machine”, and more succinct too

@A Guy That would be a fair point, except that the theory Brian linked to isn’t grand. I don’t even think its author meant it to be grand. And it isn’t a story at all, which is Brian’s point and I agree with him. I’ll try to keep the comments more succinct in the future. Ok, guy?

Great post, really is. I’m currently 139 pages into “Why Englad Lose” by Szymanski and Kuper and am already finding much confirmation bias in there (i.e., choosing their argument and then finding the facts to support it).

They mention the “Manager Honeymoon Period”, the phenomenon that new managers tend to do disproportionately well in their first few games. They mention Roberto Mancini, and the fact that he won his first four games in charge at Man City. They explain this with the fact that City were at a trough in their win % cycle, and that they naturally had to improve at some point. Yadda yadda, some bullshit later, they forget to mention that Mancini’s first four games were against piss poor teams. I can’t be bothered finding out who they were, but we’re talking Stoke, Birmingham, Bolton and Hull or something like that. Then there’s the blazingly obvious fact that when a new manager comes in, teams are riding a wave of optimism and players want to impress their new manager. But I guess because so many uneducated plebs put this argument forward, it can’t be true.

Now I have a degree in economics and studied the Economics of Sport as one of my modules, and I came across much of Szymanski’s work, but I am all too aware of the failings of economics. Where economics is advancing is in behavioural economics, combinging it with psychology, not econometric bullshit.

I’ll admit that I am in favour of a lot of their arguments. You can’t deny the incredibly strong relationship between the teams wages and their league position, nor the inefficiencies of the transfer market or why football clubs don’t run at a profit (which can be explained with some great economic graphs).

But surely the writers must have read “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics” by Jonathan Wilson, the Bible for all anorak fans out there. How can they deny that managers and tactics play a major part in determining success? Would United have won the League and European Cup double in 2080 with a flat 4-4-2? No.

There will never be a formula. Yeah you can look back and see statistics, like “no European team has ever won outside of Europe” and predict that an European team will not win a given world cup. But during any world cup, this stat can be broken. 2010 is the perfect time for that specific statistic to be broken.

And even furthermore, what’s with Fetter’s parenthetical on Holland: “(occupation imposed by the Germans in World War II aside)”? Why is that to be an aside?

The real disadvantage the Dutch have to overcome is alphabetical. Counting West Germany as a G for Germany or a D for Deutschland, no country (Uruguay aside) has ever won the World Cup from later in the alphabet than I for Italy. N is just a real outlier here.

“..correlation doesn’t imply causation; the fact that two things occurred simultaneously doesn’t prove that one caused the other without a mechanism to demonstrate the cause..”
Can we have this line, also apply with that Octopus thing that roams around the web saying Spain didn’t win because it did, but because the Octopus said so?

@Stephen Paul is the opposite of an economic formula! Those are all about marshalling overwhelming probabilities; Paul is about a streak that’s so improbable that it seems charmed. He’s like Bob le flambeur breaking the casino, or George Segal at the end of California Split. He had less than a 0.5% chance to guess all the games correctly, and he did.

You know I’m not taking anything away from Spain, but there is a magic octopus who predicts the winners of World Cup games. That just chimes with my worldview in all sorts of wonderful ways.

Yes, Hungry and Holland always failed in finals… Germany is good to come to the best 4 but is not very good in wining, but should have won sometimes… Brazil reached 7 finals and won 5, that explains a lotta things… UK and France went to Jules Rimet/FIFA Trophy based in being the home for their matches… Netherlands “didn’t get how to win”, we could say… But that is not enough, and not fair: but once it does, it’ll APPEAR that they learnt, so it’ll be less hard for future Netherlandeers to win A FINAL.